Neighborhood associations are installing license plate readers to privately police who drives on their streets

HOA management groups would gladly go this way, raise monthly fees, and take the inevitable kickbacks.

Always remove the plates after you arrive at the show. The plates mess up the vehicle’s lines.

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We’ve had a rash of catalytic converter thefts where I live, as well. When when one homeowner saw a theft occurring early in the morning and confronted the thieves out on the street the homeowner was robbed at gunpoint, so a passive system to make apprehending the catalytic converter thieves easier would be welcome since police generally arrive too late to apprehend the thieves even if they are reported as the theft is happening.

Unfortunately, thieves here tend to use stolen cars and/stolen license plates, thus making license plate cameras less effective.

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You know what is weird? Asking companies to spend more money trying to redeliver a package or to maintain some minimal local infrastructure where people can get their deliveries. Won’t anyone think about the shareholders?

In Japan, they allow you to pick a time slot for the re-delivery.
If i remember it correctly, it was two hour intervals from 0800 to 1800 and one for 1800 to 2200.
It worked pretty well.

Are most of the HOAs in the us just open for anyone who want to enter/pass through?
Here in brazil, they are all gated, which already inhibit most outside people to try to enter there.

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In the comic books, Captain America’s van had the license plate on a roller assembly so it could be changed quickly. Cap had no time for fascist HOAs.

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Does that pre-date the rotating number plate on James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5:

That first appears in Goldfinger in 1964 - Bond’s cars in the earlier films aren’t modified.

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Probably not, Cap’s van would have been late 70s.

I had forgotten Bond had one.

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“Adjustable lumbar support seats. Carpeted interior.” :rofl:

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But in this case why is important to have a license plate reader instead of a CCTV system, and in case of a crime give the mp4 to the coppers?

License plate reader doesn’t work on people with a pushbike or with a fake license plate, and work really well if the burglar is actually a neighbour.

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Please add me to the list of folks who still remember that when I am out in public, expectations of privacy are different.

They are. Which means you shouldn’t gossip loudly about your boss’s illicit affair in a coffeeshop. It does not mean that you should accept your every move being logged and kept in databases forever and the data being used to reconstruct behaviours that you didn’t put out into the public eye.

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This is exactly what the US post office does. But packages can be shipped as requiring a signature (and thus a person be home) or to be left if no one is home. Just like you stick a letter in the mail box. Most retailers shipping these days don’t ship requiring a signature, presumably because their bulk deals with the USPO make it cheaper not to.

Private parcel companies do not have access to the post office (and shouldn’t). And when their for signature deliveries go back to the depot for you to pick up, it usually involves driving to the nearest international airport to pick up. Because the private sector is fucking awful at this.

In cities and anywhere with a lot of multi-unit housing there are various postman’s keys, codes and delivery boxes or rooms. So that the postal carrier can leave packages inside in a secured common area, and theft of packages is uncommon. Private companies don’t (and shouldn’t) have access to these. This is a major reason why Amazon made a big deal about contracting the USPS for last mile delivery, so that if something is shipped by a private company it will be handed off to the Post Office to be delivered by your regular Postal Carrier. It’s also why Amazon Locker is a thing, and retail stores often provide delivery spot services.

The porch pirate thing is mostly a problem of more suburban areas and single family homes. In areas where traditionally leaving shit on the porch hasn’t been a problem. Cause shit just don’t get stolen off your porch. The very high volume of unattended, expensive packages just sort of hanging around these days made it a feasible way to make a buck. You think about it, if you grab one package there’s a pretty big chance it’s just my 3lb bucket of salt, or somebody’s baby shower invitations. But you run through one of these neighborhoods, with multiple packages at each house. You stand a pretty good chance of getting that new iPhone.

It’s easily solved by shipping with the USPO and requiring a signature. Or about a dozen other things. Like just shipping to your office, which is what I used to do when I lived in Brooklyn. Since noone but the Post Office could actually get into the building and I was sick of cabbing it to La Guardia to pick up for UPS and Fedex. A lot of times, even if I arranged to be home, those guys would just stick a tag on the building door and return it to the depot without even buzzing.

And why does it need to be permanent. When my neighborhood has very occasionally had issues along these lines we set up trail cameras and security cameras in key spots, then take them down when the problem is solved.

Of course our biggest problems are teenagers steel beer from people’s garages and people breaking into our beach access park (there’s a whole insurance thing with that, noone will give us liability insurance to make the association parks public access).

Okay, I’m going in.

In a word, nope. Even here there are limits and in the US, SCOTUS has been pretty clear on this. They draw (I think) a very reasonable line between the police following you around, versus putting a GPS tracker on your car. The latter is considered a warrantless seizure of your private information. As soon as databases and tracking not directly related to specific crimes with probable cause are involved, it crosses a line.

This key distinction is the entire reason Snowden sacrificed his liberty to blow the whistle on the NSA. A lot of what they gather is public data, but the universal dragnet warrantless nature of it is where it goes over the line.

IANAL and I don’t know if SCOTUS has ruled on license plate cameras, but I could envision a decision whereby a single camera at a security gate is okay, but blanketing a neighborhood with connected cameras that all feed into a database is not.

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Re: private sector. Well, quite. I’ve been trying to get a package delivered for 3 weeks. I’m pretty sure they drive past, see it’s a tower block, go ‘fuck that’ and log it that they’ve carded the door. Fuckers.

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I live in a condo and we are considering this after resisting for a while. For $1k per camera, it can read your license plate in the dark and has $150/month security monitoring fee. Our main issues are the surrounding townhomes and homes miss trash day and dump their garbage in or around our big trash bins. We also get construction waste when they redo their homes with monthly dumps of mattresses, water heaters, and bathtubs We have to pay extra for the bulk trash. I think our extra expenses is about $10000/year. It might save us money and it might not but I’d like to know that outside homeowners are getting cited/jailed for illegal dumping and maybe my HOA will go down (but it won’t).

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Sounds like a rational justification for the cameras that could pay off

One outcome, though, could be that you get video of the offenders, but they from outside and are never prosecuted and your HOA still has to pay $10,000 a year to clean up after them and $2,800 for your first year of a single camera. Dunno, but it’s probably better investment than the dog poop DNA testing that some HOAs have paid for.

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